


Tradition, Honor, Discipline, and Excellence

by uschickens



Category: Dead Poets Society (1989), Supernatural
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Crossover, Gen, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-05
Updated: 2010-10-05
Packaged: 2017-10-12 11:09:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/124227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/uschickens/pseuds/uschickens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Neil's death wasn't Mr. Winchester's fault.</p><p>In which founding the Dead Poets' Society turns out to be a pretty bad idea, in retrospect, and there are absolutely no jokes about Transcendentalist poetry.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tradition, Honor, Discipline, and Excellence

Neil's death wasn't Mr. Winchester's fault, but no one would listen to them. He was being kicked out anyway. Todd's new English teacher was late, so the whole class clustered around the windows to watch Mr. W leave.

A huge back relic of a car waited at the gate for him. There were low whistles of appreciation. Todd focused on Mr. W make his slow, limping way across the courtyard. When he got out the gate, a guy got out of the the vintage beast to meet him. The guy took Mr. W's bag from his shoulder - only the one duffle, even after almost three months at Welton - and threw it in the trunk. Mr. W just stood there, leaning hard on his cane.

The guy came back around the car, got right up in Mr. W's space, and even before he touched Mr. W's elbow, Mr. W just _folded_ into him. The guy's hands slid under Mr. W's arms, supporting him in an almost-hug. Mr. W pressed his forehead against the guy's shoulder.

As Todd watched the two men move slowly to the car, he heard someone hiss behind him, "A faggot and a murderer. Good riddance." He snorted; he couldn't tell which was the bigger sin in his classmates' eyes.

Most of the boys turned away then, but Todd stayed at the window. He watched the guy shepherd Mr. W into the passenger seat, tossing his cane in back and supporting him as he lowered himself into the car, right leg held stiffly straight.

When the guy closed the door on Mr. W, his shoulders slumped a little, and he turned to look back up at the school. It was the first time Todd got a good look at his face, and he started. He couldn't be sure, but he seemed to remember from that night -

 _"Goddammit, Sammy, get down!" Even over the chaos - the house crumbling around them, the screams of his friends, the wailing of some sort of_ thing _he couldn't - didn't want to - wrap his mind around, a thing that looked eerily like that picture of Walt Whitman from their poetry book, only transparent - Todd could hear an unfamiliar voice_ roaring _._

_A hazy figure barreled towards them through the smoke. It raised a shotgun, and Todd was on the floor before he even consciously registered that he was moving. The shotgun blast, so much louder than when Todd's dad used to take him dove hunting, cleared a path through the swirling, violent soup of what Todd's brain refused to recognize as ghosts._

_The figure crouched over Mr. W, pulling the curtain from around his neck and releasing him from its stranglehold. Mr. W coughed, rubbing his neck._

_"Neil," he rasped. "Upstairs. Emerson's got him."_

_"Stay here," the new guy said. "I'll go get him." He turned, saw Todd. "You. Help him." He waited until Todd nodded, then took off._

_"Dean, wait!" Mr. W yelled. "You need - dammit _." He scrabbled around for his cane and got his good left leg under him. Todd ran to help, bracing his shoulder on Mr. W's weak side. Once upright, Mr. W squeezed his shoulder in thanks, his grip far stronger than expected. Far stronger than your average high school English teacher, no matter how posh the school. Todd didn't have time to think about that.__

_"Come on," Mr. W said. "Neil needs our help, and Dean doesn't know to-"_

_A gunshot from upstairs cut him off, made him flinch. It wasn't a shotgun. Mr. W didn't look at Todd._

_"Sam!"_

It was hard to tell from the distance, but Todd was pretty sure the guy at the car was the same guy in the house the night Neil died.

Was killed, his mind whispered. By this guy? It would make more sense than what they had seen. ( _Neil screaming, hovering three feet off the floor before being thrown across the room by unseen hands. He got halfway up the stairs before he started bleeding from the eyes, nose, and ears. It was the last time Todd saw him alive._ ) Mr. W couldn't have had anything to do with it; Todd was with him downstairs when Neil shot himself - was shot - was forced to shoot himself by those same unseen hands.

Todd shuddered. In retrospect, the Dead Poets' Society turned out to be a really, really bad idea.

The guy by the car grinned a little, as if he could tell what Todd was thinking. He gave a nod, sharp and short, and Todd found himself nodding back. If Mr. W trusted this guy, then Todd supposed he trusted him, too.

The black car pulled away, its rumble reaching Todd even on the third floor, and after it disappeared from view, he turned back to his senior English class with a sigh. As Mr. Nolan droned on about the proper mathematic scale by which to judge a poem's worth, Todd dutifully turned to the preface of his literature book - or at least the place where the preface was supposed to be.

A piece of paper slipped out, and Todd grabbed it before it hit the floor. He unfolded it, and his throat stuck. It was his poem, covered in Mr. W's nearly-illegible handwriting. Mr. W had written his other poem on top of the one he had handed in, carefully recreating word-for-word his embarrassing little display in front of the class. Mr. W had underlined portions, made it look like a real poem.

At the very bottom, he had written three short lines in Latin. Todd only recognized the last two words, but he remembered them well. He remembered Mr. W on his first day of class, stumping all over the classroom, shaking his cane in that snot Cameron's face when he got all shirty about "defacing school property." Mostly, though, he remembered staring at the pictures of all the classes that had come before him, Mr. W leaning over their shoulders to whisper, "Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary." Todd couldn't help but look at Mr. W's reflection in the pictures' glass, couldn't help but see Mr. W's face momentarily twist in what almost seemed like jealousy at the time. Looking back, Todd thought it might have been grief instead. Todd wondered what Mr. W was like when he was Todd's age.

It wasn't until three periods later, in the middle of calculus, that Todd spotted the other note on his poem. He had a hard time reading it this one, too, because it was minuscule, tucked away in the bottom right hand corner. It could almost be passed off as just a smudge. Todd could make out a few letters, though.

On his break, he went to the library and its microfiche reader. Upon closer inspection, the note definitely wasn't from Mr. W - far too legible for Mr. W's chickenscratch. "Fuck extraordinary; work on staying alive first. Check the library, 130s. Robert Singer. Anything published after 2006. Good luck, kid."

Todd didn't have to guess who wrote it. He thought back to that night again and everything that had happened since then. He thought about Neil dying, helpless and afraid. He thought of his friends, the boys he spent every day with, the ones who insisted Neil was just upset about his dad and the play. He thought about Mr. W and that guy, trying to help. Really, when he sat down to think about it, he didn't have to think very hard at all.

He glanced over to the nonfiction shelves beside him - right smack in the middle of the 100s. He could almost feel the determination settle over his shoulders.

He had work to do.


End file.
